impression Archives - Complete, Concrete, Concise

WordPress – Preliminary Impressions of Photon in JetPack

richardsplanet — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:32:09 +0000

JetPack for WordPress now includes a feature called Photon:

Photon works by using wordpress.com to cache and serve up images from your site.

Since I am always looking for ways to reduce my bandwidth (and speed up performance), I enabled it.

I have observed a reduction in the bandwidth:

The 20^th, 21^st, and 22^nd averaged about 3% fewer page hits than on the 25^th – but it is obvious that (with Photon enabled) I used less bandwidth on the 25^th .

The 23^rd and 24^th are the weekend, so there is always a drop in traffic. I suspect the spike seen on the 24^th is related to enabling Photon.

Based on very limited data, Photon appears to be working well and is saving me some bandwidth. It does not require me to change anything about my site (always a serious bonus).

One thing I don’t understand is why there are suddenly more clicks on my images:

As the screen capture shows, in approximately two days, there have been 204 clicks on cached images (the cached images have the URLs i0.wp.com, i1.wp.com, i2.wp.com), whereas, the other 5 days there were only 13 clicks on images on my site.

Updated 27-March-2013 @ 14:49

One problem I have noticed while using Photon is that when I update an image on an article (i.e. replace it), the change is not reflected in the cached version.

I tried disabling Photon and then re-enabling it, but it didn’t pick up the changes.

I will have to see if the changes get picked up at a later time – at the time of this update, it has been about 3 hours.

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Fedora 16 – First Impressions – Not Positive

richardsplanet — Tue, 08 May 2012 23:45:45 +0000

UPDATED 11-May-2012

I have discovered that the problem with Software Updates and Add/Remove Software noted below was caused by VirtualBox Guest Additions not being correctly installed. This happened because

the Linux kernel header files are not installed,
GCC (a compiler) is not installed,
make (a tool for GCC) is not installed.

Installing gcc and make was not a problem. Installing the Linux kernel header files was. For some reason, kernel-devel-3.1.0-7.fc16.i686.PAE is not available (I am sure if I hunt around some more, I will find it, but that is beside the point, I am interested in install, test, use not install and fiddle around until I get some semblance of a usable system.

Notwithstanding the problems it has with VirtualBox Guest Additions, I still find it hard to like or recommend Fedora 16:

(1) The Software and Add/Remove Software applications are very slow. Clearly, it is getting info off the network, but I found it to be even slower than Ubuntu Software Center

(2) It has a borderless white menu scheme, which looks nice on a dark background:

but gets completely washed out when overlaying a white themed application (like the terminal):

(3) It insists on popping up unnecessary warnings to users. This is from the Add/Remove Software application when you click on Package Collections:

A better solution would be to either (1) refresh the cache without notifying the user, or (2) display a Yes / No dialog with the question: “The cache is invalid, would you like to refresh it?” (even that is too much information to the user). It should be option (1) and after 2 or 3 failures, then it should notify the user that something is wrong.

This is from the Add/Remove Software application when trying to install gcc (a compiler collection):

This is too much geek information for the average user. I think that software packages managed by Fedora should be automatically instead of asking the user if they trust it.

Background

I’ve played with Linux for almost 20 years. My first experience was trying to compile it, in the early 90s, from sources (gotten off a CUG CD?), but Turbo C wasn’t able to compile it.

By the mid-90s, I was playing with compiled distributables. While they were interesting and often had some neat features, I never considered them ready for the desktop.

Ubuntu 11.04 was the first Linux distro I thought just worked out-of-the-box and could be deemed ready for the desktop. When Ubuntu 11.10 seemed to take a step backwards I began trying out other Linux distros (to their credit, Ubuntu did quickly recover their mistep).

When I tried Fedora 15 in November 2011, it was a complete failure – it would not even install. It would go through the whole installation procedure only to lock up at the end.

Fedora 16 did install.

The Setup

I installed Fedora in a VirtualBox (4.1.12r77218) system. The virtual machine was configured to have 1 cpu, 1024Mb memory, 128Mb video memory (3D acceleration enabled), 8Gb hard drive.

I installed the VirtualBox Guest Additions.

Some images may be clicked for full sized versions.

Installation

Unlike Fedora 15, Fedora 16 did install, although the initial messages displayed when booting off the install DVD were not encouraging:

Installation was quick. This is probably because I downloaded the 3.7GB DVD image and it installed off the DVD without downloading files from the Internet.

While the installation procedure is not too complicated, it is certainly not as simple as Ubuntu’s or Linux Mint’s.

I chose the basic install (although I was tempted to install development tools as well).

First Boot

After installation, I rebooted the machine and was delighted to see it boot up with no problems.

The default background image is an underwater scene that is strongly reminiscent of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (one of my favourite books):

Problems

While it did boot up and various applications I tried worked, there are at least two applications that don’t work: Software Updates and Add/Remove Software.

As mentioned above, this was caused by VirtualBox Guest Additions not installing (despite my thinking they had).

Of course, Fedora should allow me to recover from a failed software install instead of become resasonably unusable.

This effectively means I can’t apply software updates (including security updates) to the system, nor can I install new software packages – effectively rendering the system useless.

When launched, both applications display the following warning:

Not the most user friendly message, but at least it suggest (to me) a course of action. I opened up a terminal and ran yum-complete-transaction as root:

It tells me there is one transaction that needs to finish:

As it runs, it displays page after page of warnings and errors:

Trying the recommended suggestion to run with the flag --skip-broken doesn’t help either.

Finally, I get the following notification (not consistently, when logging in):

Conclusion

From my experience, Fedora Linux is an extremely big disappointment because it just doesn’t work out of the box.

What makes it more disappointing is that it is based on the venerable Red Hat Linux – a distro I played around with in the 1990’s.

Of course, nowadays, Red Hat makes its money selling service and support to enterprises, not by giving away free copies of its Linux distribution.

Of all the Linux distros I’ve tried since 2011, Fedora Linux is the only one that doesn’t work. Period.

Other distros may have issues (not recognizing my WiFi adapter being most common), but at least they work.

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Wubi – First Impression – Fail

richardsplanet — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 10:29:38 +0000

A visitor (who was kind enough to leave a comment) brought Wubi to my attention.

Wubi allows you to dual-boot your system between Windows and Ubuntu without having to repartition your hard disk.

It does this by creating a large file on your Windows system that it uses as if it was its own personal hard disk.

Thinking this sounded cool and would allow me to try out Ubuntu on real hardware rather than in a VirtualBox virtual machine, I downloaded it.

According to the Ubuntu documentation all I need to do is:

Run Wubi, insert a password for the new account, adjust other settings such as the disk space, and click “install”.

The whole Wubi experience fell apart as soon as I ran wubi.exe – it kept throwing up these errors:

I’m not sure how many times the message came up. I was estimating 30-40 times (because I didn’t count). However, I got the same error message when I uninstalled Wubi (and I counted): the message popped up 94 + 24 times (they came in two separate batches).

After the error messages ended, I got to the install screen and it looked like the one on the Wubi page. I filled in the information and it proceeded to download Ubuntu 11.10 (AMD64 version). So far, so good everything appeared normal. Well … except for the funky colour scheme on the install dialog. I’m not sure what sort of font anti-aliasing technique they were using, but the text in the box looked awful:

It is more evident in this cropped and zoomed in image:

After the install, I actually had an \ubuntu directory and a number of folders and files in it totalling about 8GB.

After restarting my computer, I didn’t get the expected OS booting options – I booted straight into XP. The same when I shut down my computer, then started it up.

I ran the uninstaller and it gave me the same Windows - No Disk message I got on startup.

Despite the errors, it did remove the \ubuntu directory.

Thinking it might be my system (Windows XP with Service Pack 3), I checked Ubuntu’s site and:

Windows 7, Vista, XP, and 2000 are known to work with Wubi. Windows 98 should also work, but has not been thoroughly tested. Windows ME is not supported.

All I can say is: the latest version of Wubi does not work with Windows XP + Service Pack 3.

I was very impressed with Ubuntu 11.04 and felt that at least one Linux distro finally made it “mainstream”. However, the problems with Ubuntu 11.10, the Unity interface debacle (they should allow users the option of using a standard interface AND provide some sort of interactive tutorial on how to use Unity), and now this total failure of Wubi has eroded my positive impressions from 11.04.

Over the past few weeks, I have returned to my original impression that Linux will never be a mainstream OS because it doesn’t treat the user experience as important – users want an appliance, they don’t want to have to tinker with it, they don’t want to have to troubleshoot, they just want to be able to use it.

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